Marketers obsess over customer and user experience. And it makes sense why: better experiences drive better engagement. But too often, digital employee engagement — where businesses use digital platforms to deliver better employee experiences — is put on the backburner.
This need to change. A good digital employee engagement program, which sits within the wider concept of employee engagement, can drive employee participation, boost enthusiasm and enhance company culture. Here’s how.
Differences Between Traditional and Digital Employee Engagement
Traditionally, employee engagement involves in-person team meetings, performance reviews, company events, and ad hoc surveys to evaluate employee morale and engagement. While these methods are still valuable, employers will often miss important insights if they neglect digital outreach and engagement with their workforce.
Digital tools provide businesses with an efficient way to achieve employee engagement in a precise and personalized manner. Additionally companies can collect comprehensive first-party insights that allow them to make data-driven decisions that further enhance employee engagement.
Combined, these tools help businesses understand the sentiment around essential company announcements, as well as break down productivity and job satisfaction at an individual level.
Why Digital Engagement is Crucial in Today’s Business Environment
Happy workers are more productive. But today’s business environment presents unique challenges to keeping employee satisfaction high. Some of the struggles that modern employers and HR professionals face are:
- Remote and hybrid working environments make it harder to foster collaboration and a sense of community.
- Accelerating employee training in response to the rapid change enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technology.
- The globalization of the workforce and the communication barriers that this presents.
- The need for personalized experiences that nurture cultural diversity, meet individual needs, and keep up with employee expectations.
- Creating scalable business structures and internal processes that support growth instead of hindering it.
Digital employee engagement is the key to solving these challenges, offering a seamless way to connect with, engage and support employees no matter where they are.
Benefits of Digital Employee Engagement
Digital employee engagement can be the deciding factor in an organization’s long-term success. Let’s examine its benefits.
Improved Productivity and Performance
Digital tools streamline and automate repetitive processes, freeing up time for employees to spend on more valuable, revenue-driving activities. They empower employees to remove common productivity hurdles by enabling real-time collaboration and easy access to internal knowledge-sharing hubs.
Webinars can deliver engaging training sessions, enhancing individual performance and creating a culture of continuous learning. The in-webinar engagement data collected helps ensure that sessions achieve their goals and can highlight areas for future training.
With data-driven insights from different platforms, businesses can quickly identify potential issues, discover areas of low performance, and understand where to focus their efforts to improve productivity.
Enhanced Communication and Collaboration
Good working relationships between employees and management are vital to success. This requires effective communication, mutual respect and a culture that encourages collaboration.
To collaborate effectively, employees need to understand each other’s unique strengths and communication styles. This involves building connections – and with increasingly distributed work environments, simply walking over to a coworker’s desk is no longer an option.
Project management platforms, video conferences and instant messaging solve many basic communication issues. However, when it comes to team building, more ingenuity is required. Take a look at our virtual event ideas for companies to see how you can boost employee engagement with online team-building events.
Increased Employee Satisfaction and Retention
It makes sense that employees who feel appreciated will report higher levels of job satisfaction than those who do not. But in a fast-paced environment where deadlines are mounting and there’s always something else to be done, ensuring that hard work doesn’t go unnoticed can sometimes slip through the net.
Digital tools and platforms make this easier. With chat devices, feedback boxes and “react” buttons, employees can quickly congratulate each other and make their appreciation known.
Digital engagement tools also facilitate reward programs, mentoring, and knowledge-sharing. Employees can expand their expertise and work towards a specific career goal while being supported by their employer.
And with a recent survey from Gartner finding that just 46% of employees are satisfied with their career development, anything that helps employees progress will help retain them, too.
Key Components of Digital Employee Engagement
Before introducing an employee engagement plan, you have to first understand the core components. These are the elements that are necessary for effective digital employee engagement.
Effective Communication Channels
Employees communicate through multiple mediums, from collaborative project management tools to instant messaging platforms. The more user-friendly the interface, the more seamless these interactions will be.
Effective communication relies on clarity. There should be dedicated communication channels for different purposes, and proper training must be provided to make sure that they are accessible to all employees. This includes providing clear guidance around things like how employees can submit HR complaints or raise personal requests with their line manager.
Employee Recognition and Feedback Systems
According to a Gallup study, only 23% of employees strongly agree that they get the right amount of recognition at work. The same study also showed that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week considered themselves “fully engaged.”
The data is clear. Employees don’t just want recognition for the good work that they do – they also want feedback on how they can improve, and they become more engaged when they get this feedback regularly.
Employees also need to be able to congratulate and thank each other for their contributions. Digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer feedback can boost morale and motivation while facilitating collaboration.
Professional Development and Training Opportunities
Businesses that don’t place emphasis on progression and professional development run the risk of employees losing interest in their work. And if businesses don’t invest in training, they also risk employees disengaging because they don’t know what to do.
That’s why professional development and training opportunities are vital to employee engagement. Employees are more likely to feel motivated and committed to producing their best work when working towards a goal and not just stagnating.
Virtual workshops, online learning platforms, and goal-tracking systems allow employees to upskill and form progression plans with their managers. They also make it easier to carve out personalized learning paths which lead to better results.
Collaborative Tools and Platforms
Digital tools connect the workforce and encourage collaboration, even when employees are physically far apart. Shared documents, project management software, instant messaging channels, and webinar interaction features all allow for better teamwork and communication.
These tools and platforms streamline processes, foster engagement, and create a greater sense of community among team members. When backed up by a robust internal wiki, employees benefit from a shared understanding of organizational goals, leading to more effective collaboration.
Strategies for Implementing Digital Employee Engagement
Assessing Current Engagement Levels and Identifying Gaps
To know where your efforts will be most beneficial, you need to understand existing engagement levels and identify areas that require improvement. Analyzing employee engagement data should be your first step.
If you’re not currently using any digital engagement tools, there are other ways to find this information. For example, you could conduct employee surveys and focus groups to generate insights into employee experiences and needs.
Developing a Comprehensive Digital Engagement Plan
Your digital engagement plan will achieve the most when it’s built around a clear set of objectives. These objectives should target the areas you identified for improvement while aligning with your organization’s values and culture.
After you’ve chosen specific, measurable goals and determined your key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s time to start brainstorming solutions. Including employees in this process can help set you up for success further down the line.
You’ll then need to consider which tools and tech can help you implement your plan effectively. Platforms that are simple to use with inbuilt engagement features can remove friction for employees and provide intuitive ways to connect.
Once you’ve defined responsibilities and developed a timeline, the final step is to communicate the plan to all employees. After this, it’s simply a case of setting the wheels in motion and regularly evaluating progress.
Creating a Feedback-Rich Environment
Creating a feedback and continuous improvement culture is key to successfully implementing any digital employee engagement strategy. To do this, employers must set an example by listening to and acting upon employee feedback.
Transparency goes a long way towards cultivating an environment of openness, so communication must be two-sided. Digital channels provide a means for employees to share their ideas and concerns, but leadership teams should also use them to discuss organizational changes.
Opting to use project management platforms with space for employees to feedback on each other’s work is also key. It can be worth introducing company-wide training to ensure people have the necessary skills to constructively give and receive feedback.
Technology for Employee Engagement
Technology is pivotal in employee engagement, connecting remote workers and providing greater flexibility than in-person interactions. Strategic use of the right platforms can help to form a more connected, productive, and satisfied workforce.
However, relying on too many different tools can overcomplicate things and end up deterring employees from engaging. To help you choose which tools are right for you, consider the following uses:
- Communication and collaboration – platforms like Slack, Asana, Trello and Microsoft Teams streamline collaboration and enable real-time communication.
- Feedback and surveys – specialist employee feedback tools like ThriveSparrow and TeamMood help organizations quickly gauge employee sentiment via pulse surveys and engagement assessments.
- Performance management – 15Five, Lattice, and BambooHR are all popular performance management tools that can help simplify processes like goal-tracking and performance reviews.
- Virtual events – virtual event platforms like ON24 are crucial for online meetings, teambuilding activities, and training sessions.
ON24 doesn’t just facilitate interactive and inspiring virtual events that help bring companies together. Our digital engagement solution is also on hand to offer personalized employee experiences, knowledge sharing via on-demand content, and the opportunity to turn your most engaged employees into company advocates.
With in-depth analytics helping you build a comprehensive view of employee engagement at every level, it’s easy to measure the impact of your initiatives and make data-driven decisions that propel your organization forward. Get in touch to find out more about how we can help.
